News

Diamond Anniversary Concert

• Canadian Opera Company
• At the Four Seasons Centre
• In Toronto on Saturday

It took only a few sheets of plywood to turn the Four Seasons Centre into a concert hall. The boards, painted grey and suspended around and above the stage, were installed for performances of Stravinsky's The Nightingale, to give some acoustic oomph to the onstage orchestra; but they also came in handy during a gig by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and again on Saturday, when the COC Orchestra came above ground for the company's 60th anniversary gala concert.

In every case the results have been pretty exciting. In the orchestral bits of Saturday's show, everything the band played came out with clarity, warmth and enough presence to sound quite engaging even in the last row of the top balcony (where I sat for the concert's second half). Opera is why the Four Seasons exists, but it could be a choice stop for any A-list ensemble for whom Roy Thomson Hall (2,700 seats) is too big and the Royal Conservatory's new Koerner Hall (1,100) is too small.

Of course, a good hall is nothing without a good performance, and we got that in spades from conductor Johannes Debus, returning for his first appearance with the orchestra since becoming COC music director in January. He led the orchestral numbers with a clean beat and a keen sense of lyrical tension. He was quick to catch the mercurial changes in Berlioz's Menuet des feux follets (from Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust), a piece full of booby traps; and patient enough to coax out a majestic performance of Siegfried's Funeral March (from Wagner's Gotterdammerung). Debus was always attentive to the momentary needs of his three guest soloists (all of them last-minute replacements for an ailing Ben Heppner), yet always showed a clear idea of where the main path lay.

Lyric tenor Ramon Vargas, in a break from a run of Gounod's Faust at the Met, appeared in three French arias and a duet. He has an attractive, ringing sound, and at moments did beautiful things, though he seldom sang quieter than forte, and often above the pitch. I felt as if I were being shown a voice first, and a dramatic incident in song only secondarily.

John Treleaven came to his Wagnerian episodes with a shining Heldentenor voice, a relatively fluid lyrical style, and an apt measure of dramatic heft, especially in the Rome Narration from Tannhauser (an odd slab of music drama to find at a concert). His fault was the opposite of Vargas's: He tended to sag below the pitch, and had a habit of creeping up on notes that shouldn't have been difficult to hit squarely.

Baritone Russell Braun had the best innings of all, in a first-class performance of O du mein holder Abendstern, from Tannhauser. His feeling for the dramatic moment, and his variety of tone and phrasing, made for the most thorough acting job anyone could do while standing stock-still. His performance of Mercutio's Mab, la reine des mensonges, from Roméo et Juliette, was also very good, in part because Debus put some swing into Gounod's swaying duple meter.

The COC Orchestra gave a good account of all this music, both as a group and in numerous solo episodes. Too bad there was no role in this show for the COC Chorus, which is as much a part of the company as the orchestra, or for Canadian music, which should be.

In a piece in Saturday's Globe, I wrote that the COC had not done an opera by a living composer since 2001, somehow forgetting its very successful performances of Poul Ruders's The Handmaid's Tale in 2004.